“How about that?” Jo sneered. “His parents were murdered. He’s fucking Batman.”
“If he’d been fucking Batman, this would be much more interesting,” Harriett said, and they both cracked up.
“You two obviously aren’t listening,” Nessa said. “Good old Spencer must have murdered his parents.”
“You think?” Jo asked.
“Pretty sure,” Nessa said.
“Yeah, sounds about right,” Harriett said. “No one gets rich that fast without having blood on his hands.”
No one seems to have seen or spoken to John for the next ten years—until the day he reappeared in Manhattan. Now, however, he was calling himself Spencer Harding. And thanks to extensive plastic surgery, he was virtually unrecognizable. He’d created a new identity for himself—one he fiercely protected.
In 2001, a new gallery opened in Chelsea. Its handsome young owner seemed to have an inexhaustible source of private funding. Soon his client list rivaled those of far more established dealers. Their curiosity piqued, a few of his competitors hired private investigators. But no one could ever find out much about the mysterious Spencer Harding. Though often photographed out on the town with models and actresses, he avoided publicity and never gave interviews. Those who knew him say he rarely spoke about himself or his background. The little clues he dropped never added up to much. One of Spencer’s clients was certain he’d been raised in L.A. Another had been told he was English by birth. But DNA evidence has now confirmed that Spencer Harding was indeed John Anderson, the orphaned teen from the Upper West Side.
By 2005, Spencer Harding had become one of the wealthiest men in the country and the handsome bad boy of New York society. But many Americans first heard his name four years ago, when he married the Olympic athlete Rosamund Stillgoe. It was, by all accounts, a whirlwind romance. Depressed after a torn ligament kept her from competing in the Olympics, Rosamund was swept off her feet by the dashing multimillionaire, whose penthouse apartment famously featured its own helipad. Little did she know that her Prince Charming would turn out to be a monster—or that the helicopter in which he’d whisked her away would one day serve as his coffin.
“Who writes this shit?” Jo asked. “Is there some kind of style guide you can buy if you’re hired to write for the Dead Woman Industrial Complex?”
“I find the music quite captivating,” Harriett said. “That lonesome guitar twang really speaks to the unfolding tragedy.”
“Ladies,” Nessa chided them. “Focus?”
Later on Newsnight: Rosamund Harding cut off contact with her family and disappeared from public view. Was her disappearance by choice? Or was she being held captive by her husband?
Jo sobered instantly at the sight of the Hardings’ wedding portrait. “Poor Rosamund,” she muttered. “If only we’d known what she was trying to tell us with that apple. We could have rescued her from the Pointe on Memorial Day.”
“I wish we had,” Harriett agreed. “I underestimated her husband. I didn’t think he’d kill her. I can’t make the same mistake again.”
“So you don’t know what’s going to happen?” Jo said, just to confirm.
“I see the war, not the battles,” Harriett replied.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Jo asked.
“Stop!” Nessa once again brought them to order. The show had begun again with news footage taken the day Nessa had discovered the girl in blue.
On May sixth, three local women stopped along Danskammer Beach. They took a little-used path that led from the road to the water. Along the way, they discovered a nude corpse in a thick black trash bag, its drawstring tied in an elaborate bow. The body belonged to a young Black female, whom authorities estimated to be between the ages of seventeen and nineteen. There were signs of intercourse, but no wounds or bruising on the body.